Some Questions about Morphology

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Some Questions about Morphology
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What is a morpheme?

• The smallest linguistic unit of meaning
• Can not be analyzed further
• ept, mit, luke, ceive are problematic examples
  yet they are morphemes

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What is a derivational morpheme?

• Adding a morpheme to a root to give a new
  wordoften results in change in syntactic category

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What is an inflectional morpheme?

• Bound grammatical morphemes that are affixed to a
  word

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Can you write down the eight inflectional
morphemes in English

• -s, -ed, -ing, -en, -s, s, -er, -est
• This makes English a very poorly inflected
  language but highly analytic language
• Historical reason was the shift in word stress

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What is a free morpheme?

• Constitute words themselves can stand on their
  own

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Which is a more productive morphemeun or able

• able is more productive because it can be added
  to any verb but un has limitations
• Often there is a lexical gap
• Unsad and ept

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What is an infix?

• An affix inserted in the middle of the word.

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Word Formation
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What is a compound

• Joining two or more words to form a new word
• Meaning may not always be inferred from the two
  morphemes and must be stored separately in the
  brain
• flatfoot, egghead

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What is a back-formation?

• words that came into existence from elimination
  of some affixoften this is done by mistake
• editor, hawker, stoker, hawker are all examples
  of back formations
• My daughters example of razor
• Some examples such as donation just show a normal
  morphological process

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What is an acronym?

• Words derived from initials
• Question when do you use an article?
• FBI, CIA, CDC
• NAFTA, AIDS, OPEC
• ButUGA, KSU, IBM, NBC

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What is the OED?

• Oxford English Dictionary

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Who was Dr. Samuel Johnson?

• Lexicographer published Dictionary of the
  English Language in 1755

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Two additional concepts

• Idioms
• Metaphors